The Ontario government has introduced legislation that would prohibit underground infrastructure owners and operators from charging fees to locate buried utilities.

The Building Infrastructure Safely Act, 2023 was introduced in the legislature on November 22. It takes aim at a practice that was discussed last spring. At the time, Enbridge proposed to charge utility contractors $200 per locate request it received through Ontario One Call.

That didn’t sit well with Ontario’s civil contractors, which estimated the impact of the charge could be as much as $65 million, given the annual volume of locates submitted to Enbridge.

In a letter to Energy Minister Todd Smith last spring, National Capital heavy Construction Association executive director Kathryn Sutherland warned the charge would, “have a profound impact on the Ontario construction industry,” adding that “we have received information that other underground infrastructure owners are planning to implement similar charges.”

“The volume and collective amount of these charges will completely destabilize the construction industry,” she added.

The new legislation would stamp out that practice altogether.

“We need to build critical infrastructure faster and smarter to support our growing communities,” said Todd McCarthy, Minister of Public and Business Service Delivery. “Banning locate fees would stem the possibility of spiralling costs that delay construction projects and increase costs. Our bill, if passed, would help streamline the process to ensure projects like improving transit, connecting more people to high-speed internet and getting homes built move ahead more efficiently.”

The free-of-charge locate system is consistent with a long-standing industry practice across Canada and the United States.

The province says it also plans to bring forward regulations to help streamline the locate delivery processes that would cut down on the number of times a locate needs to be repeated.

In 2022, Ontario One Call coordinated approximately 1.2 million requests for locate services.